Blood Bank Gets An Infusion

Buyout Saves Ailing Agency In West Palm

Central Florida's largest blood bank is buying out the financially ailing South Florida Blood Banks in West Palm Beach, an agency wounded by years of blood wars and crippled by this year's hurricanes.

The buyout, which will leave Palm Beach County without a local blood service for the first time since 1948, could be a first step to ending the decades-old feud between South Florida's two blood banks, said the chief executive of Florida's Blood Centers in Orlando, the buyer in the deal.

Orlando CEO Anne K. Chinoda on Monday said she hopes to meet soon with her counterpart at rival Community Blood Centers in Lauderhill, hoping to find ways the two blood banks can cooperate rather than compete.

"This is a huge area with a huge amount of blood," Chinoda said. "There's more than enough market here in this region. You don't have to have one blood bank successful at the expense of the other."

Blood banking long ago ceased to be a feel-good community service in South Florida. The two nonprofit operations run like businesses vying for donations from donors that they can sell to customer hospitals.

Ending the hostilities may not be easy, said Dr. Charles Rouault, president of Community. His bank collects a sizable amount of blood in Palm Beach County and is a few months from opening a new operation center in Lantana.

"I don't think [the buyout] will change the blood situation at all, immediately," Rouault said. "There will still be two blood centers in South Florida bumping heads, and donor collections will be the main area."

South Florida Blood Bank supplies about 15 local hospitals, and officials at two said they expect no problems.

Orlando will change few if any of the blood bank's operations immediately, Chinoda said, other than trying to boost collections in order to boost revenue. The price of its blood may have to rise, she said. The buyer also will assume more than $10 million in debt the blood bank incurred, most in the past 15 months.

South Florida Blood Bank -- originally Palm Beach Blood Bank -- foundered after two years of losing more than $1 million a year. The last straw, Chinoda said, was the hurricanes in September. Donations halted and surgeries were canceled, drying up revenue. Chief Executive John Flynn asked the Orlando blood bank for a buyout a month ago.

"This year has been more difficult for them," Chinoda said. "They said, `Well, we have to make a change.'"

Flynn has agreed to take a buyout and depart, she said, although it's unclear if his wife, Maria, will remain. Together, the two were paid $380,000 a year, agency reports showed.

The blood bank had expanded into Miami-Dade County during the 1990s, and landed a big contract with busy Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. But it could not collect enough to consistently meet demands, and had regular spot shortages. Jackson switched to Community in May.

"The problem was simple. They couldn't supply all the blood we needed," said Jackson spokeswoman Maria Rosa Gonzalez-Carrero.

Community now collects about 240,000 units a year and supplies three dozen hospitals; South Florida supplies about 100,000 to 15. The two used to be about the same size.

There was no chance of the two blood banks merging, Rouault said: "We've been competitors so long, there was a lot of hard feelings and they were not going to talk to us."

Bob LaMendola can be reached at blamendola@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4526.